Дмитрий Шепелев (Dmitriy Shepelev) was easily the best thing about the hosts of last night's Eurovision semi-final. He looked even hunkier than this picture and his silliness in the Green Room was easily forgiven, compared with the two main hosts, Andrey Malakhov and Natalia Vodianova, who were atrocious, as per usual for Eurovision. He has spent the last ten days hosting nearly a hundred media conferences for the assembled hacks, so he deserves a pat on the back. I would be happy to give him one.

Russia had a year to prepare for this, but only announced the hosts last week. Did no one want the job? The lack of preparation showed through as clearly as the lack of a scriptwriter. If they had one, they must have wasted all their time writing that twaddle for the opening sequence, which wasted five minutes of my life. We have to put up with the terrible twosome again on Thursday. They should promote Dmitriy to the main stage and get rid of the bouffant man. Luckily, we have completely different hosts for Saturday's final, in the sexy shape of Alsou, who represented the motherland in 2000, famously accompanied by equally sexy British dancers David and Will, who Wogan memorably described, with a talent for accuracy which sometimes deserted him, as "big girls' blouses". Alsou will be accompanied by the splendidly named Ivan Urgant. Perhaps he will live up to his (almost) surname and just get on with the bloody thing.

Here's another picture of Dmitriy Shepelev, this one in the Eurovision media centre, courtesy of eurovision.tv. Every day that goes by makes me wish a little more that I'd gone to Moscow. Sigh.

Chig is directly descended from the following families. If you have one of these surnames, we're possibly related, so feel free to get in touch:
Crowe, Harborne/Harbourne, Higgins, Hutchins, O'Sullivan/Sullivan, Talliss/Tallis.